Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 255 for the week February 27 - March 4, 2012.

In This Issue

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) Beta 1 Released.

Ubuntu 12.04 Development Update

Ubuntu Stats

LoCo News

Michael Hall: Contributing to Unity for non-developers: Keywords

Tiago Hillebrandt: Interview: Nick Tait, Unity project manager

Clint Byrum (SpamapS): Precise is coming

Canonical Design Team: About Usability Testing – Recruiting

Ubuntu's Bold Mobile Gambit

Ubuntu 12.04 hits beta, brings smooth Unity for marching masses

Ubuntu for Android Gets Shown Off At Mobile World Congress

Paul Wise: Debian/Ubuntu games screenshot party results

In Other News

Other Articles of Interest

Featured Podcasts

Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings

Weekly Official Ubuntu Flavors Team Meetings

Upcoming Meetings and Events

Updates and Security for 8.04, 10.04, 10.10, 11.04 and 11.10

And much more!

General Community News

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) Beta 1 Released.

Kate Stewart of the Ubuntu Release Team has announced the first beta release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products, along with the recognized flavors. "Codenamed 'Precise Pangolin', 12.04 continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work throughout this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs."

Ubuntu 12.04 Development Update

The Developer News team writes about the transition of Ubuntu 12.04 from Alpha Testing into the first phase of Beta Testing. Nicholas Skaggs has a number of items you can help out with by simply doing a bit of testing.

Also covered are some reoccurring events (including the new Fix-it Friday) and an interview with community member Benjamin Kerensa who has recently begun to get involved with development.

The post wraps up with a list of outstanding tasks which need to be completed, several ideas for getting involved, how to find something to work on and getting in touch with Ubuntu developers.

LoCo News

2012 Ubuntu-my LoCo Team T-shirt

Khairul Aizat Kamarudzzaman writes that recently the Ubuntu Malaysia Team held a competition to design an Ubuntu Malaysia t-shirt for the up and coming Ubuntu 12.04 release. The winning design has been chosen and orders for the T-shirts are now open to Ubuntu users in Malaysia.

Jamming Artists and the Ubuntu Community

Charles Profitt of the New York Ubuntu LoCo blogs about having an artist contribute to the Ubuntu Community by producing Forum Avatars for the Ubuntu Global Jam and several new art resources for the New York Loco Team. "Beautiful!! The team now has a much improved logo to use with print media as well as properly sized logos for Launchpad, the loco portal, and our wiki page."

Ubuntu Global Jam Italy (Pistoia): a quick review

Andrea Grandi shares with us an Ubuntu Global Jam event that was held in the city of Pistoia, Italy. There were 15 participants (with several more participating via IRC) with the main focus areas being translations (from English to Italian) as well as learning to implement automatic tests. The day was rounded up with a tour of the city and a great time was had by all.

The Planet

Michael Hall: Contributing to Unity for non-developers: Keywords

Michael Hall publishes a 4-step tutorial on his blog explaining how non-developers can contribute to the Unity Dash by making the application search functions better. His tutorial includes how to add keywords to an application and send the changes to Ubuntu to be included in the 12.04 release.

Jono Bacon: Call For Manual Test Writers

Jono Bacon shares a call for volunteers to help write manual Checkbox tests for several applications to help ensure consistent quality in the 12.04 release. The now released beta1 is mentioned in this post, but the tests will also be used for the beta2.

Clint Byrum (SpamapS): Precise is coming

Clint Byrum shares with us some of the work done by the Canonical Server Team in the past two years that has “led to precise’s awesomeness.” He covers inclusion of CEPH in Maverick, improvements to Upstart in Natty, the debut of juju and more.

Canonical Design Team: About Usability Testing – Recruiting

Every three months Charline Poirier conducts Usability Testing to gauge progress towards achieving a greater user experience with Ubuntu. Often times the question arises about the process that was followed and Charline has started to answer this multi-faceted question starting with this post, the focus of which is recruiting participants.

In The Press

Ubuntu's Bold Mobile Gambit

Katherine Noyes of LinuxInsider writes about Ubuntu for Android and how it "became clear that the news had struck some kind of chord with observers far and wide, prompting nothing less than a large-scale reconsideration of the current state of computing." Some of the responses were positive towards Canonical and Ubuntu while others just saw this as another attempt to stop Canonical from hemorrhaging money.

Ubuntu 12.04 hits beta, brings smooth Unity for marching masses

The Register reports on the first beta of the upcoming 12.04 LTS release on Thursday. Among many new features and a much more stable version of Unity, they report that this version looks to have a renewed focus for business with a longer support period and a Business Remix.

In The Blogosphere

Ubuntu for Android Gets Shown Off At Mobile World Congress

Joey Sneddon of OMG! Ubuntu! reports on AndroidCentral’s Phil Nickinson’s comments from one of the premier events for mobile devices, Mobile World Congress (MWC). This year it was held in Barcelona and Ubuntu for Android was strutting its stuff. Sneddon was impressed and excited to the point of “want now” but reports that “exact details remain scant on the ground as to when you can expect to get your hands on it.”

Paul Wise: Debian/Ubuntu games screenshot party results

The Debian/Ubuntu games team recently organised a half-day screenshots party for creating screenshots for all the games that are available in Debian/Ubuntu. “Over the 7 hours of the party, they uploaded 100 screenshots for 40 different packages. Of the packages, 2 are available only in Debian (auralquiz, cutechess), one is available only in Ubuntu (plasma-widget-tictactoe) and the rest are available in both. “I think we got quite a bit done for such a small group.”

Powerful 'Cotton Candy' Linux PC goes on sale

John E Dunn of TechWorld writes about 'Cotton Candy' a powerful tiny computer that can run either Ubuntu or Android 4.0. "The $199 (APS139) computer's small size - it is enclosed within a USB stick case - belies its power. Underneath lies a custom design comprising a 1.2 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor with 1GB or RAM, supporting for up to 64GB of microSD storage." Dunn goes on to say, "Despite being commercial, Cotton Candy is not a huge distance away from the philosophy of the UK's Raspberry Pi project."

HUD Is Now Available For Unity 2D Too [Ubuntu 12.04]

A very last minute inclusion sees HUD available in Unity 2D. At time of writing it isn’t available in the official Precise repositories but by adding the Unity Team PPA it can be installed (see article for more details/instructions)

In Other News

Ubuntu for Android success at Mobile World Congress

With more than 4000 delegates visiting the Ubuntu booth in the first two days at the recent Mobile World Congress John Bernard of Canonical reports that the booth was a resounding success. “The reception has been overwhelmingly positive among hardware manufacturers and operators, and indeed among hundreds of individuals and enterprises who can’t wait to get their hands on a new smartphone running Ubuntu for Android.”

Glossary of Terms

Ubuntu - Get Involved

The Ubuntu community consists of individuals and teams, working on different aspects of the distribution, giving advice and technical support, and helping to promote Ubuntu to a wider audience. No contribution is too small, and anyone can help. It's your chance to get in on all the community fun associated with developing and promoting Ubuntu. http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate